Innovations in diagnosing and verifying the level of success of treatment of disease have migrated from external imaging processes to internal diagnostic processes. In particular, diagnostic equipment and processes have been developed for diagnosing vasculature blockages and other vasculature disease by means of ultra-miniature sensors placed upon the distal end of a flexible elongate member such as a catheter, or a guide wire used for catheterization procedures. For example, known medical sensing techniques include angiography, intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), forward looking IVUS (FL-IVUS), fractional flow reserve (FFR) determination, a coronary flow reserve (CFR) determination, optical coherence tomography (OCT), transesophageal echocardiography, and image-guided therapy. Each of these techniques may be better suited for different diagnostic situations. To increase the chance of successful treatment, health care facilities may have a multitude of imaging and sensing modalities on hand in a catheter lab during a procedure. However, traditionally, each procedure and control room in a typical catheterization lab will have its own instance of all medical devices that might be used in procedures in those rooms. For imaging procedures, this requires each catheter lab to have its own expensive computer equipment if there's any chance of needing that equipment. Duplication of equipment across multiple catheter labs occupies space in space-constrained hospital environments, creates clutter, adds management cost (installation, service, administration, etc.) to maintaining multiple identical physical devices, and limits scalability of devices and sharing of resources. Further, computing equipment deployed in these catheter labs may have a substantial amount of frequently-idle general-purpose computing power.
Accordingly, while the existing devices and methods for medical-related computation have been generally adequate for their intended purposes, they have not been entirely satisfactory in all respects.